Sea Stories

Water quality

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 18:33:37 GMT

Recycling the Mighty Waters of the Mekong River

By Al Bell

Proud to be able to do so in Tibetan Sanskrit syllabary, Chinese characters, and Roman letters, Tönpa Shenrab, the lama, pulled open his robes and began writing his name. The warm yellow stream melted the snow and combined with the water to form a small rivulet coursing down the mountainside. It was April of 1969 and the snow on this part of the Tibetan Plateau was near the melting point anyway.

Farther down the mountain, past a pile of yak dung in the rivulet, sat a seven and a half foot tall yeti musing about whether, with better representation, he could have had a career in the NBA. Ultimately deciding that his thick fur coat would make extended basketball play too difficult, he stood up and wandered off up through the snow to his cave in the mountains. Sadly, his large footprint, complete with dermal ridges that would have delighted cryptozoologists, filled with water from the growing stream and disappeared.

Now a brook, the water flowed by a small village where Sherpa women washed their clothes on a large, flat rock. It was their first opportunity to wash family clothes since the cold autumn several months ago. The reeking vestments yielded up a soup of bodily excretions and bacterial plaques. Oil and dirt were carried away by the now brown waters. The brook passed by village after village now, each making its noisome contribution to the water.

Entering China, the river passed villages interspersed with towns. The towns were larger, but too poor to afford sewage treatment facilities. This pollution did not trouble the simple people, for the waste quickly disappeared in ditches down into the stream. In Yung-Nan Province of China tributaries added to the stream, and it was then called Lancang Jiang (Turbulent River). Small factories discharged heavy metallic industrial byproducts into the water to give it color and flavor. Poisoned by the chemicals, fish floated to the surface and decayed. Abundant rainfall ensured that the waste storage ponds of the large pig and poultry farms overflowed into the river.

In Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam the Lancang became the familiar Mekong. The area there known as the Golden Triangle was the source of much of the illegal opium and heroin production in the world. Chemical byproducts of that production enriched the growing river. The Mekong flow slowed in the broad Vientiane Plain, where young Laotian boys washed their carabaos. Carabaos, indigenous to Southeast Asia, were water buffalo domesticated in the Philippines as far back as pre-Hispanic times and were used by farmers in Southeast Asia to plow the fields. Rains also overflowed the vast, night soil fertilized rice paddies along the river. Several gorges and falls prevented navigation and mixed the potent ingredients of the water.

The Sambor rapids above Kratie in Cambodia were the last to impede navigation. Merchant freighters below there pumped their bilges into the river before entering Phnom Penh. In villages along the river from there to South Vietnam, the words for “toilet” are “crap bridge” in their respective tongues because the typical toilet is a small, rickety pier built out over the water.

Near Tan Chau, a town on the Cambodian-Vietnamese boarder, a U.S. Navy lieutenant lay perspiring in darkness behind the berm of a rice paddy. He had come to Tan Chau as an advisor on a South Vietnamese LSIL (Landing Ship Infantry, Large). The LSIL had escorted several merchant ships up the Mekong to the Cambodian border and was then waiting several days for the ships to unload and load cargo before escorting them back down the Mekong and out to sea at Vung Tau on the coast.

I was that lieutenant. Bored with sitting around in a U.S. Army advisors' shack waiting for the ships to return, I had volunteered to go out on ambush with the Army advisor and his Vietnamese Ruff Puffs (Regional Forces and Popular Forces – local South Vietnamese militias). There had been intelligence that a group of Viet Cong was going to sneak across the border from Cambodia near Tan Chau. Our mission was to intercept and destroy the VC.

I had an M-16 rifle and a 45 CAL pistol, but not much else. The key item that I was missing that all of the soldiers had was a canteen. The weather was hot and humid, and, by 0300 hours, I was thirsty as hell. No VC had shown up. It had been a false alarm.

Sensing my growing distress, a Vietnamese soldier asked me in a whisper whether I would like some water. I replied, “Yes, please!” Instead of simply handing me his canteen as I had expected, he crawled away into the darkness. After what seemed forever, he returned with a full glass of water; I mean an honest-to-goodness glass such as one would find in a fine restaurant in Saigon. I drank the water quickly, ignoring the odd taste. I couldn’t see the water in the darkness.

I asked, “Where did you get the water?” “From the river,” he responded proudly. Thinking about the interesting 3,000 mile length of the Mekong River, I marveled that I was still alive.

A couple of hours later, before returning to the advisor shack, I unbuttoned my fly and returned the water to the river.

Tags: Mekong, water, water quality, pollution

Lazy Sailor

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 23:03:54 GMT

Seaman Posey: Part I

By Al Bell

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

In the spring of 1972 in the Battle of Dong Hoi, a guided-missile frigate, USS STERETT (DLG 31), was attacked while patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin. In a surprise attack, the North Vietnamese sent out bomb-loaded Mig jets and anti-ship missile firing patrol boats. STERETT fought off the Migs and patrol boats, downing a missile and a Mig with her antiaircraft Standard missiles. The Mig downed by STERETT had dropped a bomb destroying USS HIGBEE’s after 5” gun mount. HIGBEE was a World War II vintage destroyer accompanying STERETT. The STERETT's 5" 54 gun aft took out the suface targets as they headed away.

I was the Weapons Officer on USS REEVES (DLG 24), which deployed to the Tonkin Gulf in September of 1972 as a replacement just as STERETT was returning to the U.S. The situation was very tense. One cannot understand the stresses that people served under in that environment without having been there. One who did serve there, P.T. Deutermann, a retired Navy captain, has written a novel about that environment called the Edge of Honor. It was painful for me to read that book because it so accurately described one of the most unpleasant periods in my life.

However, into that hard life came comic relief in the form of Seaman Posey. He became an important factor to me and is now my most enjoyable memory from that stress-filled time. I don’t even remember his first name, but for reasons you will see, I will never forget his father’s full name.

Seaman Posey was a young sailor from Houston, Texas. He reported on board REEVES when she was in Hawaii preparing for that upcoming deployment to the Tonkin Gulf. It was immediately apparent that Seaman Posey hated any form of work, or regulation of where he was to be or what he was to do. He made Beetle Bailey look like a go-getter. Like the loveable but lazy Beetle, Posey had his nemesis, Chief Moravec. Boatswain’s Mate Chief Moravec, however, was not the stupid, bloated Sgt. Snorkel of Beetle Bailey comics. Chief Moravec was a bespectacled, intelligent fellow, who, if given a tweed jacket to wear and a pipe to hold, could have been mistaken for a scholarly New England prep school master. Moravec had the thankless task of being the First Division Chief and thus responsible for the performance of Seaman Posey. Up the chain of command a couple of notches, I was Posey’s Department Head.

I had 175–200 other men in about five other divisions, and my main focus in life was ensuring the constant and continuous readiness of the ship’s missiles and guns, as well as being responsible for all seamanship evolutions. I had received a year and three months of highly specialized training in four different Navy schools to prepare me for that task. I had served during one previous Tonkin Gulf deployment as Weapons Officer of REEVES. Now we were going back into harm’s way.

Before our departure, Seaman Posey had managed to get into trouble, resulting in Captain’s Mast—the Navy’s term for commanding officer’s Article 15 non-judicial punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). This sounds a bit technical, but just like Posey, you will understand it. The UCMJ replaced the Navy’s notorious “Rocks and Shoals,” Articles for the Government of the Navy, which had harsh punishments, but which prohibited flogging and other severe punishments common in the Navy before the twentieth century. Under the UCMJ, commanding officers were like a judge and jury, meting out punishments such as restriction to the ship, reduction in rate, reduction in pay, extra duty, and, if you had a brig on board, up to three days in it with bread and water. Unlike enlisted men in the Army, Air Force, or Marine Corps, a sailor could not refuse Mast and request a court-martial.

Posey’s offense was a day’s unauthorized absence from the ship. He was restricted to the ship for a couple of weeks by the commanding officer, Captain Lee Baggett Jr. Restricted men had to remain on the ship and appear for muster several times a day. Often extra duty was tacked on the punishment.

During Posey’s restriction, he climbed down a mooring line to a “doughnut” (a float with a well in the center into which water discharged from the ship flows, containing any oil that might be in the water). From the doughnut he climbed up to the pier. Now, at this point, he could have walked aft into the darkness of the pier in Pearl Harbor, and no one would have noticed him gone until morning muster. Instead, he walked forward, directly past the Quarterdeck of the ship. The Officer of the Deck and other watchstanders saw Posey and ordered him to come back on board. In what became an all too common mode of address, Posey defiantly uttered a bold non sequitur, “You can’t mess with me! I’m on restriction!” He continued walking in the direction of the Enlisted Men’s Club, where he was apprehended and returned to the ship. He was placed “on report” again for a whole list of offenses: breaking restriction, unauthorized absence, violating a direct order of an officer, etc. Posey was off to a very bad start.

Because one ends up spending ninety percent of one’s effort on the one percent of sailors who are screw-ups, I got to know Posey very well. Every time that he committed an offense against the UCMJ, I had the pleasure of interviewing Posey. I had once dreamed of becoming a clinical psychologist, and, to that end, I had majored in psychology at Duke University. The Navy had converted me into an engineer, following Ivan the Terrible’s principle, “If beaten sufficiently, even a serf can learn to play an acceptable game of chess.” Nevertheless, I believed that I could still draw upon my past education and reason with Seaman Posey to convince him of the error of his ways and to “square him away,” as we say in the Navy.

I was wrong. He had an answer for everything. The chief assigned him the wrong jobs; he wasn’t cut out for chipping and painting ships. However, he did no better when assigned to mess cooking or other duties. When there was work to be done, Posey wasn’t there. He would hide from Chief Moravec.

The ship got underway from Pearl Harbor and headed for the Gulf of Tonkin. One day at sea I was “managing by walking around” when I encountered Posey slinking along the main deck, hiding behind equipment and trying to stay out of view of someone, but clearly not me. I stopped him and asked what he was doing. He replied that he was hiding from the chief. I reminded him that the chief worked for me and that I was no happier than the chief that he was trying to skate out of work. He said, “Yeah, but you ain’t gonna hurt me. That chief gonna hurt me.” I assured him that the chief was not going to hurt him, but I was thinking, “Why did the Navy give up on flogging?” I put him in the gentle hands of the chief and went on my way.

Another day I happened along as Chief Moravec was pulling Seaman Posey out of a fan room, a small compartment containing only a ventilation fan, but large enough for a man to hide. Chief Moravec had just asked Seaman Posey what he was doing hiding in a fan room. Posey asked, “Evahbody’s body different ain’t it, Chief? Chief Moravec responded, “So?” Posey then announced, “My body need mo’ sleep!”

The current method of producing ethanol in the United States reminds me of Posey. Producing ethanol from corn, using a natural gas process, uses more energy than can be extracted from the ethanol. Similarly, Seaman Posey exerted more effort to avoid work than would have been required to perform the work in the first place. Certainly, his superiors put more work into Posey than they got out of him.

Continued below:

Tags: USS REEVES, guided missile cruiser, Vietnam War, leadership

A Rescue at Sea and Reunion Years Later of Participants

Tue, 21 Oct 2003 20:26:58 GMT

The link below is to the heartwarming story of a young Vietnamese woman who located, using the Internet, tracked down the captain of a US Navy destroyer who had violated orders in order to rescue her and 69 other boat people in a storm in 1982. It relates the overwhelming gratitude that she and her family lavished upon him when he attended her wedding over nineteen years after the rescue.

http://www.ussmortondd948.org/Sea_Stories_Capt_Bell_s_rescue_story.html

Tags: Rescue at sea, human interest, heartwarming stories, inspirational story, boat people

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My Trip to the Moon

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:12:35 GMT

My Trip to the Moon

by Al Bell

After training to become an advisor to the Republic of Vietnam Navy, I arrived in Saigon in late March of 1969. I was initially assigned to be what was called a Fleet Command Advisor to the captain of a Vietnamese ship. In this case the ship was a WWII Landing Ship, Infantry, Large (LSIL). My first voyage was up the Bassac and Mekong rivers to Tan Chau, escorting a convoy of merchant ships to Cambodia. The small LSIL’s 3” gun, 20 mm cannons and .50 cal. machine guns protected the merchant vessels from ambush.

When I returned to Saigon, the Naval Advisory Group had discovered that I was an expert on LST 542 tank landing ships, similar to those being transferred to the RVN navy under the Vietnamization program.

I just had a couple of days in Saigon before I had to join up with "my” Vietnamese. I made the most of it by dining two nights at a restaurant for U.S. officers. This restaurant was atop the Johnston Bachelors Officers Quarters, which was across the street from the Continental Hotel in downtown Saigon. There was a cute, naive little waitress, Co Duc, with whom I enjoyed a little innocent flirting.

I took about one hundred Vietnamese officers and men to Guam in May to train on the ship and to supervise the overhaul of the ship. It turned out that I was very well suited to the job.

My Vietnamese counterpart was Tran Van Chi, a lieutenant commander in the Vietnamese navy. After the turnover, he was the captain of the ship. After a great deal of work and a big ceremony, USS Coconino County (LST 603) became RVNS Vung Tau (HQ 503) in June. However, we still had much to accomplish before we could depart.

While the ship was being overhauled and I was training the crew, the Apollo 11 Mission was also gearing up for its July 16 launch for the Moon. I followed developments on the radio, for there was no television available in Guam. When the landing occurred on July 20, I hung on every word. When the astronauts returned to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, President Nixon flew to Guam to meet them.

Shortly after that, RVNS Vung Tau (HQ 503) sailed for Vietnam by way of the San Bernardino Straits in the Philippines. I assisted with the celestial navigation en route.

We arrived in Saigon in August to a big celebration, featuring the Chief of Naval Operations of the RVN Navy, a band, rows of sailors, and pretty Vietnamese girls with armloads of flowers.

That night I returned to the restaurant, where my waitress was again Co Duc. A full moon was visible low in the southern sky. Air pollution caused the light rays to refract such that the Moon seemed twice normal size.

Co Duc inquired, “Dai Uy [Lieutenant], where have you been? I have not seen you for more than a month.”

I replied, feigning amazement, “Didn’t you read about me in the newspaper? Was there nothing on television or radio?”

“About what?” she asked.

“I have been to the moon!” I exclaimed, pointing to the glowing orb.

At first she seemed doubtful, but then she remembered hearing something about the mission and began asking me questions about what the moon was like.

I responded with a degree of detail that would have made Neil Armstrong proud. As I spoke, I could see her becoming totally enthralled by the magnitude of my feat. At last, she could wait no longer. She began rushing around telling the other waitresses of my trip to the Moon. They, too, became excited and gathered in groups chattering and pointing at me. Finally, word reached the cashier, the only educated, intelligent person on staff. Unfortunately for me, the game was up. Not only had the cashier cashed checks for me, but she knew the names of the Apollo 11 astronauts. She told the waitresses that I was joking.

Co Duc was not amused. I had caused her to lose face among her friends and coworkers. Furious, she ran over and screamed at me for deceiving her. I had to leave with my tail between my legs. Fortunately, I was soon transferred to river boats in the U Minh Forest of the Mekong Delta, where, thankfully, I had only to deal with VC and NVA armies.

Afterwards, on rare occasions when I visited Saigon, I went to the old restaurant. Each time that I entered the room, there was a chorus of shouts, “Apollo! Apollo!” Even Co Duc had forgiven me my weird sense of humor. I hope that in later years she told her children with a smile about my famous Moon mission.

Tags: Moon landing, Vietnam war, Vietnamization, gullibility, LSTs, Corwin Bell, Al Bell

Trauma of war

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 19:15:27 GMT

Quick Kill; Slow Gnawing Guilt

Although I was in or around Vietnam much of my life from November 1964 to January of 1973, a dark period of one year as an advisor to the Vietnamese Navy on brown water riverboats in 1969 – 70 is what is burned most indelibly into my memory.

I had volunteered for and prepared for that assignment more thoroughly than I had any other in my Navy career. This was motivated by my strong desire to survive the experience. I was ordered to five months of schooling at Coronado and at Camp Pendleton, much of it by Navy SEALs, Marines, and former advisors to the Vietnamese navy.

Because the Army had found that in Vietnam most firefights took place at ranges of less than 50 yards, their experts had become enamored of a method of shooting developed by a trick shot named Bobby Lamar ("Lucky") McDaniel and began teaching it as “Quick Kill” to soldiers at the Infantry Training Center at Fort Benning on the outskirts of Columbus.

Before my official training began in November of 1968, I took leave in Columbus, Georgia, at my parents’ home. While I was home, my dad arranged with his Army brass buddies for me to undergo three days of this training.

The training began with a special Daisy BB gun, which had no sights. You were required to shoot this BB gun with both eyes open pointing instinctively at the top of the targets, which were aluminum disks tossed into the air. Amazingly, trainees quickly became proficient at hitting progressively smaller disks until half of the trainees could hit a disk the size of a penny most of the time. The best I could do was hit a quarter size disk about 70% of the time. Considering that the disk was sometimes edge on as the BB passed and BB guns are not noted for accuracy, I thought that was pretty good. In the training students transitioned to the service weapon, the M-16 rifle. The key to Quick Kill was not to aim, but to point. It was hard for me not to aim, for I had grown up in the South where accurate aim was a highly prized skill; one at which I was exceptionally good.

The training of prospective advisors in California consisted of theories of counter-insurgency, practical knowledge of Vietnamese culture, use of explosives, radio procedures, air and artillery support procedures, small unit tactics, boat tactics, and six weeks of intensive Vietnamese language training. We had a great deal of physical training. All of this time I continued to practice Quick Kill with a BB gun.

We were shipped up to Camp Pendleton to learn to use all types of small arms, including mortars, grenade launchers, and portable rocket launchers. Eventually we underwent Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training at Coronado and Warner Springs. When all of that was over, I felt I was truly ready to win the war all by myself.

On the riverboats, I continued to practice Quick Kill. In free fire zones in the U-Minh Forest, devoid of people, I shot at every target I could find. Coconuts were my favorite target because, full of liquid, they exploded when hit.

One day, an expended small aluminum pop flare casing came floating down stream past our boats lined up on the bank of a stream. Vietnamese sailors on boats upstream of me began shooting at the inch and a half diameter tube floating with about five inches above water. The casing danced in the water unscathed by a rain of bullets from the sailors. As the flare approached my boat, the sailors began shouting, “Dai-uy, Dai-uy!” (Lieutenant, Lieutenant!). When it was 75 feet away, I picked up my rifle and sank it with a single shot. The sailors shouted, “Troi-oi Dai-uy, troi-oi Dai-uy!” (Heavens above, heavens above Lieutenant!). My reputation was made, but this came back to haunt me.

In several firefights, mostly at night, I never saw the enemy at whom I was shooting. At night I fired at their muzzle flashes or at the points of origin of their green AK 47 tracers. I might have ended a whole tour full of combat without any certainty that I had killed anyone.

One afternoon, however, near the end of my tour as our riverboats were lumbering up a river, the Vietnamese began shouting to me,”Dai-uy, Dai-uy, VC!” My Vietnamese counterpart, Lieutenant Long, was actually tugging at my shirt directing my attention to a Viet Cong soldier running along the berm of a rice paddy over 75 yards away and opening fast. The man had an AK 47 and was wearing the faded, torn and patched black pajamas that I had seen so often on VC prisoners and bodies. Lieutenant Long wanted me to shoot the man, who was already under fire from every available rifle. All the VC had to do was drop down behind the berm and he would have been safe. Instead, he ran for his life in full view.

Ironically, aim was required for this type of target instead of the instinctive Quick Kill method I had practiced so thoroughly. Using my boyhood skills, I aimed and fired. The small kick of the rifle momentarily disturbed my sight picture. The man was no longer there. The Vietnamese were certain that I was the one who had shot him although many of them were shooting. They convinced me that I had killed the man.

Although that was war, and I was performing my duty, I felt bad. Each day in my life since then I have thought about the Vietnam War and the futility of so many lives lost with so little to show for it. Not a day goes by that I do not reflect on my personal experiences there, but nothing eats at my psyche as much as that one shot. Although I did nothing wrong, I cannot shake a feeling of guilt. One’s mind cannot overrule one’s heart.

No religion tortures me with this guilt. No objective analysis by experts would question anything that I did. The Vietnamese thought it was great that I shot the enemy. Had he lived, he might have killed many of them. However, today I am cursed with an inability forget something that I cannot bear to remember.

Tags: War, marksmanship, killing, combat, death, weapons, Vietnam, river war, PTSD

Reunions

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 06:03:49 GMT

Cold Steel and Warm Camaraderie

By Al Bell

An odd coincidence occurred in the summer of 1992 when I was working as a consultant on government contracts in San Pedro for Southwest Marine, Inc. (SWM). USS Morton (DD – 948) was towed into that shipyard along with four other ships for "recycling." Morton was a Forrest Sherman Class destroyer that I had commanded ten years earlier.
I was working at SWM writing claims against the government almost the entire time Morton was being dismantled and cut up. It wasn't a pretty sight. She had been "demilled," or demilitarized, by having her gun barrels and other armament cut off before she arrived. Each day I saw more of her cut off and stowed in an enclosure in the shipyard. Most who know me understand that my two years in command of that ship were the high point of my life, so you can imagine how I felt. Every piece cut off of her was a piece off of me. I went on board often, but not having a flashlight with me, did not go below decks. Walking around her when she was in this condition was a very depressing experience. Our crew had worked so hard to keep her shipshape and beautiful all those years ago. They had also prepared her to sleep well in the mothballed fleet, ready to answer the call to battle, if again sounded.

When she was placed in a floating dry-dock, I went on board the dock to examine the hull. I wanted to see the sonar dome. The ship had been gently grounded one night in February 1982 on a sandbar outside Pearl Harbor by my best and brightest Officer of the Deck (OOD - the officer in charge of the ship when the captain is not present on the bridge). However, we did not know of the incident until we had a routine hull inspection in Guam during our deployment much later. (Reports of a scraping sound had been reported to the OOD by a sailor in a berthing compartment, but that information was never relayed to me). The damage was not sufficient to require repairs (only paint was smudged off), but it was more than sufficient to end my chances of promotion. A grounding is a grounding, however slight. As Commanding Officer, you are fully, inescapably responsible whether you are on the bridge or not, at fault or not, so you graciously accept your fate. At least they were kind enough to allow me to keep my command with a mere admonition -- a real rarity in such situations.
Anyway, I wanted to see the "damage," so I was standing on the dry-dock looking up at the dome (no damage was visible), when the owner of the recycling company came up and asked me why I was so interested. I told him that I had been her last skipper. He asked me to help him with a problem he had. The ship had been turned over to him without any paper on board. They were having trouble selling equipment not knowing the manufacturer, capacity, power requirements, output, function, etc. I gave them a Propulsion Plant Operating Guide containing all of that data. In return, they gave me the bronze light from the top of the mast.

The work continued until there was nothing left of the ship. In a bit of irony, the last that was seen of the ship was her appearance as backdrop in a“B” movie, Cyborg II, with Jack Palance and Angelina Jolie. Palance played the part of a crazed Navy captain, who roamed the bridge of one of the rusting ships, trying to control the world. SWM sometimes made more money renting their waterfront to movie studios than by repairing ships. (The Usual Suspects was one of the more famous of these films.) It was a sad end for a ship which had distinguished herself in intensive naval gunfire support operations during the Vietnam War. She won the Gold Gunnery “E” battle efficiency award more often than any other destroyer in our squadron.

During my career I had always been irritated by the Marines saying that the Navy mans equipment, while the Marine Corps equips men. Nevertheless, there is a certain truth to their expression. That expression, however, is not fully explanatory of a certain phenomenon recognized during every commissioning ceremony. The sailors bring life to the ship. That belief is behind the part of a commissioning ceremony where the crew marches swiftly on board the vessel. Ships are a complex interplay of man and machine. When you serve on a ship, you are an integral part of what seemsto be a living organism. The men with their various skills and the ship with its various capabilities form a cohesive entity pulsating with life. When I walked the decks of Morton as she was being scrapped, that life was totally gone. She was just cold, rusting steel. However, when I am with the crew members of Morton at reunions, I feel that life again, even without the ship. There is a camaraderie that spans the years and brings back all of the good feelings without any of the pain of the hardships that we all endured.

What I most like about those reunions though is the chance to not only renew friendships, but to make new ones with people whose experiences may have been in a different timeframe, but which were similar enough that we have a common language and background. Our time together with such comrades is very important.

Finally, those of whatever generation of Morton who steamed far perhaps to train or to fight in foreign lands share a common feeling. We know that our greatest comfort was to have our friends close at hand. Though we consider ourselves patriots, in the heat of operations at sea, or battle, it ceases to be an idea for which we fight, or even a flag. Rather, we fight for the man on our right, and we fight for the man on our left. When navies have rusted and been cut up for scrap and crews have been scattered to the four winds, when empires fall away; all that remains is the memory of the precious moments we spent side by side.

Tags: Camaraderie, patriotism, combat, friendship, nostalgia, battle, war, ships,destroyers

An Incident in Vietnam

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 22:44:21 GMT

Sea Story II

In September of 1969 in a remote town in the Mekong Delta called Kien Hung, I was a Navy lieutenant in the process of relieving LT Jim Gautier as Senior Advisor to the South Vietnamese Navy’s River Assault and Interdiction Division 72 (RAID 72, for short). Jim’s time in Vietnam was up and he was going home. His twenty-one boats were moored side-by-side along the bank of a narrow stream which fed a larger river, the Song Cai Lon, running 20 miles northwest to the sea.

The river boats were of various types, most converted from 50 foot long World War II Mike 6 landing craft. There were monitors armed with a 40 mm Bofors gun in a turret, 20 mm gun mounts, 50 Cal machine guns, and an 81 mm mortar. There were heavy armored troop carriers, speedy assault support patrol boats, and a command and control boat. I rode in the latter boat, which featured 20 mm gun turrets, 50 cal machine guns, and a great deal of communications equipment. The U.S. Navy had operated these boats as the Mobile Riverine Force, or, as U. S. Army General Abrams called them, the “Great Green Fleet.” Now, the boats were a part of the Republic of Vietnam Navy manned by Vietnamese sailors, who were trained and advised by experienced American Navy personnel.

Kien Hung was the headquarters of local regional forces and popular forces of the South Vietnamese military. Those soldiers were like a local militia made up of people living in the area, who were armed and trained by the government to defend their region. The “Ruff Puffs,” as they were called, were advised by a small group of U.S. Army advisors, who lived in a small “hooch,” or tin-roofed house.

While Jim was in the process of turning over his responsibilities to me, we stayed with the Army advisors in their hooch, which had some conveniences of home like a refrigerator stocked with beer and a ping pong table. Local women cleaned the place and prepared some meals.

One of the women had a ten year-old son, Tran, who hobbled around the hooch on crutches. During a Viet Cong mortar attack on the village months earlier, a hot fragment of a mortar round had severed the tendons in the back of one of his knees. Scar tissue behind the knee had shrunk, permanently freezing the leg at a 90 degree angle. Tran was a friendly smiling young man, who did all in his limited power to be helpful to the Army personnel. He became sort of a mascot to the small group of five soldiers. He probably reminded some of the older soldiers of their children at home in America.

The soldiers’ medic had done everything possible at the time of Tran’s injury to minimize the handicap, but orthopedic surgery would be necessary to restore function to the leg. The senior advisor and the medic had communicated the boy’s condition to higher authorities and arrangements had been made for U.S. Army surgeons in Saigon to repair the leg. However, consent of the parents was required.

The parents would not consent unless they could be with their son to Saigon during the surgery and recovery period. The advisors therefore arranged for the whole family to be lifted by helicopter to Saigon. However, when the day came, the parents backed out, afraid to ride on a helicopter. The boy, doomed to be a cripple for life, seemed, nevertheless, to be in good spirits.

Jim and I suggested that the family might be able to ride north in one of the Vietnamese Navy boats, at least as far as Long Xuyen, but there seemed to be little interest on the part of the family. Fatalism was endemic in the area. The people there had been victims of both sides during the decades of war.

Tran had a good command of English because of his association with the advisors, so he translated for his friends. I recall one memorable occasion when the whole village was seated outside the advisor hooch to watch a movie. The advisors had a 16mm projector, and films were circulated from place to place to entertain the troops. The advisors shared with the villagers by projecting the films onto a sheet in the wide doorway of their hooch. People outside, sitting on the ground could see, but not understand the film. Tran explained what was happening.

The movie I recall best was Yellow Submarine. That animated psychedelic adventure brought the Beatles to Pepperland to help thwart the Blue Meanies. The children of the village really howled with delight at the animated character “Nowhere Man.” Not much translation was required for the kids to figure out what was happening. Nevertheless, Tran was their hero for explaining the weird story.

One day before our boats were to begin an operation deep into the notorious NVA/VC stronghold in the U Minh Forest region of the Mekong Delta, a USO handshake tour by a couple of actors was to take place at the advisor hooch. All of the Americans in the area gathered in the hooch for the occasion. A helicopter landed and two former child actresses disembarked for a thirty minute visit with the soldiers. Neither actress was anyone we recognized. Still, the soldiers appreciated the break in the action. After the actresses departed, Jim and I sat around the ping pong table talking and drinking beer with the Army advisors.

Suddenly, the canal beside the hooch erupted in a giant explosion. Large fragments of metal flew through the building tearing it to shreds. A column of water, raised a hundred feet by the explosion, fell, collapsing the roof of the building. Sitting on the edge of the ping pong table, I dove for cover in a sandbagged bunker just as the beam over the table broke under the weight of falling water.

After the confusion and terror subsided, I found that none of the Americans was seriously hurt. I was soaking wet, but unscathed. The roof had fallen onto the ping pong table where I had been sitting. Examination of the fragments revealed that the VC had used a dud USAF 500 lb. bomb as a mine. The printing could be read right off a four by fourteen inch hunk of sharp steel imbedded in a sandbag. The fragment was still hot. The Viet Cong had suspended the bomb under a sampan and cut it loose as they passed by the hooch on the bank of the stream. A timer had later detonated the mine, probably in an effort to kill everyone assembled for the USO visit. Viet Cong monitored US radio frequencies must have heard some announcement of the USO visit.

No Vietnamese Navy boats were damaged, but a Vietnamese sampan loaded with civilians taking produce to market was blown up.

Ashore, there was only one fatality – Tran was killed.

Tags: IEDs, Riverine warfare, Vietnam War, Mekong Delta, human interest,

Lazy Sailor

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 23:00:45 GMT

Seaman Posey: Part II

Posey also proved that his body needed more sleep very soon. Under the relatively new Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, many Navy rules were relaxed to improve the lot of the sailor. Ships went to what was called “reduced bridge manning.” Instead of having a helmsman, lee helmsman, boatswain’s mate of the watch, quartermaster of the watch, port lookout, starboard lookout, after lookout, and several officers, the ships dropped to about four people on the bridge and one or two lookouts. REEVES had only a forward and after lookout for the open ocean part of the transit to the Gulf of Tonkin. One night Seaman Posey was our only forward lookout.

The ship had numerous high-powered radars, some lethal within as much as one thousand yards with microwave radiation, which heats tissue. The radars had to be aimed at a person to do that. Safety cutouts, as well as the fact that the radars were high above the ship, prevented any cooking of crewmembers. Nevertheless, the one forward lookout had to be posted on the flying bridge above the bridge, where the officers stood watch. As an extra precaution, we removed the lookout from the flying bridge prior to any radiation of the missile fire control radars.

During seaman Posey’s night watch as lookout, the officer of the deck (OOD) saw a light on the horizon. It was a boat that had not been reported by the lookout. The OOD picked up a sound-powered phone and called the lookout to scold him for his inattentiveness. There was no response. The OOD and the boatswain’s mate of the watch (BMOW) then climbed ladders to the flying bridge. There, sleeping on the deck, was Seaman Posey. They removed his phone headset, and he remained asleep. They woke him and placed him on report for the serious offense of sleeping on watch.

This was an offense that could go to a court-martial, for this was wartime, and we were in the South China Sea approaching Vietnam. After investigations by my subordinates, it was my turn to interview Seaman Posey. He invoked his right to remain silent; therefore I referred the case to Captain’s Mast.

Mast was a formal affair held on the bridge of the ship with everyone in Seaman Posey’s chain of command present, along with witnesses and any representative desired by the defendant. After the OOD and the BMOW had testified, the Captain asked, “Posey, what were you doing sleeping on watch?” Posey responded, “Captain, I wasn’t sleeping, I was just lying down to avoid being sterilized by that radar.” The Captain directed his next question to me, “Commander Bell, were you radiating the fire control radars while Posey was on watch?” I responded, “No sir.” Posey jumped in, “But they was moving around!” The Captain asked me, “Were the radars moving around?” My response, “Yes sir. We conducted Daily Digital Systems Operability Tests while he was up there, but, as you know, the radars were tracking system-generated targets and no radiation was involved. The radars move as they track the imaginary targets.” The Captain pressed on, “Would Seaman Posey know whether the radars were radiating?” My response was, “No sir.” The Captain announced, “Case dismissed!” It was clear to me that the Captain felt we were simply beating a dead horse. He was looking for any reason to dismiss the case. Seaman Posey already had enough restriction to last the rest of the deployment, and he had been reduced to the lowest pay grade, seaman recruit. Keel hauling was not among the punishments available to the commanding officer under the UCMJ.

Seaman Posey continued to screw up as we endured our deployment. Most of the time the ship was slowly patrolling just 25 miles southeast of the North Vietnamese port of Haiphong. The ship’s main jobs were to carry a large helicopter that rescued downed aviators and to control the combat aircraft that patrolled the skies between us and the North Vietnamese mainland. President Nixon was bombing the hell out of North Vietnam with Operation Linebacker II, the B-52 campaign against North Vietnam in December 1972. We were still performing our mission in January of 1973, when the Paris peace treaty was finally signed, ending the war. Our ship eventually returned to Pearl Harbor via Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. Of course, Seaman Posey never went ashore in any of those lovely places.

In March during our port visit to Sasebo, Japan, we received a message from American Red Cross saying that Seaman Posey’s mother had died. We immediately sent him home on military flights for thirty days of emergency leave.

After a couple of weeks we received a message from the recruiting station in Houston, Texas, saying that Seaman Posey had come into their office to request a hardship discharge. The basis was that the now-deceased mother had been the sole source of support of the family. Reportedly, the father, a man in his forties, could not work due to a back injury. While the request was being processed, Posey would remain in Houston.

On REEVES we were sympathetic to Posey’s plight, but delighted that we would never see him again. He had required tons of administrative effort and hour upon hour of personal counseling.

The ship returned to Pearl Harbor and Posey was forgotten. One day, months later, however, the ship’s second-in-command, the Executive Officer (XO), had me paged to come to his stateroom. Knocking and entering the stateroom, I was surprised to see Seaman Posey sitting there with a sheepish look on his face. Soundlessly, the serious-minded XO handed me a letter. I could not believe my eyes. The letter read as follows:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

Dear Sir:

I Dr. John A. Dabney, M.D., did hereby on the 25th day of April, 1973, A.D. did hereby examine the said WARREN H. POSEY on this date and found the following symptoms.

E-ray show that he has torn ligament in the right shoulder caused by over strain and awkward slip. From the torn ligament its caused slight paralization in the right hand and caused somewhat constant cramps.

Further x-ray show that from the fall, he has a slip disk in the lower part of his back. One from the fall he had in this same accident. This will cause constant pain and somewhat unusual spasement.

Due to these findings I find it impossible for him to perform any labor or to do anything without constant pain.

Your sincerely yours,

[signed John A. Dabney, M.D.]

1935 Copper Rd.

Houston, Texas

Notes written on the letter by the recruiters aiding Posey indicated that investigation showed there was no Dr. Dabney in Harris County, or anywhere in Texas. City Planning had no 1935 Copper Road; Copper Road was a one-block street.

I burst out laughing, but the XO was angry and told me in no uncertain terms not to laugh because this was a very serious matter. I asked the XO for permission to step outside to regain my composure. He allowed me to leave, so I ran as fast as I could to the Captain’s Cabin.

I knocked and stepped in. I asked the Captain if he knew that Seaman Posey was back. Shocked, he said, “No! Why?” I said, “I’m not exactly certain why, but for some unknown reason the hardship discharge was not granted.” I then handed him the letter. His reaction was the same as mine. He burst out laughing and said, “Al, make me some copies of this!”

I made the copies. He sent copies to his friends and fellow captains. He kept one copy in his golf bag to show to fellow golfers just at the point when they were about to make critical drives or putts. He even mailed a copy to my father, with whom he had played a round of golf during my father’s visit to Hawaii. I still have the letter Posey had submitted to support his discharge application.

The due diligence of the recruiters in investigating the incident was above and beyond the call of duty. They had even arranged for Posey’s father, “the said Warren H. Posey,” to be examined at a VA hospital, since he was a veteran. The examination revealed not only that Mr. Posey had no infirmity, but, more significantly, that he did not claim to have any. Seaman Posey, it seems, had not brought his father in on his scheme.

The Captain’s handwritten letter to my father, which I also still have, says, “Dear Mr. Bell, Thought you might get a chuckle out of letter received to support hardship discharge application by one of Al’s ‘stars.’ Notes were written in by Navy Reps in Houston who investigated status of man’s family. ‘Star’ is currently UA [unauthorized absentee]…”

Indeed, I don’t think I ever saw Seaman Posey again before my tour ended, and I was transferred to shore duty. However, I remember him with great sympathy and wonder whatever happened to him. As much trouble as he was in those days, I smile whenever I think of the entertainment value of having him around.

Somehow, I don’t believe that he is a dot-com millionaire now. He may be on welfare, in jail, or standing on a corner somewhere near you with a cardboard sign saying, “Disabled Vet, Please Help!” One thing can be counted upon with absolute certainty: Wherever he is now, Posey is not working.

Tags: Tin cans, sailors, sea stories, humor, jokes, fun,